infoarch

Social Media should support networks within companies and over its boundaries. It should break down silo's in companies. The same goes for the silo's in people's lives, work and private life. But does it really? I've been wondering about this topic for some time. I've been rereading The Cluetrain Manifesto  and found it's been mentioned there as well. And now with the arrival of Google+ people are wondering if this will be the social backbone (must-read piece BTW!). What am I talking about? Well, we have all these social tools that support parts of our lives. Some only work on the intranet, some only on the internet. Some are more for personal, private sharing, others are more work-related. Many have approximately the same functionality. So, you always get the question: Where should I share my information (without pushing the same information to all these services at once)? And where do I get an overview of all my social interactions? I was hoping somet...

Some time ago I said: Vacation First . I wanted to share my review of professor Andrew McAfee's book Enterprise 2.0 before I went on vacation. That didn't work out. I wish I could have written this review sooner, because the sooner you read this book the better. I'll tell you why. Andrew McAfee coined the term 'enterprise 2.0' (in 2006) and has been one of the leading thinkers in the space of applying web 2.0 concepts and tools (or 'collaborative media' as McAfee likes to call them) to the workplace. This book summarizes his thinking over the years. Of course he's been blogging and speaking about this topic. So I was wondering if this book would bring me new insights. Well it did. And to me this is why I love books. You know thinking about the topic you're reading about in a book won't stop as soon as the book has been published. But a book does give you a summary of past thinking and concepts for future thinking. And all that in a limited...

Just a small post to invite you all to join the next KMers Chat on this Tuesday, October 5 from 17:00 - 18:00 UTC. I'll be moderating this chat. Participating is easy. All you need is a Twitter account. Just wait for the chat to begin and make sure to append your tweets with #kmers . Lots of interesting and smart people join in . This chat will be about: Relating structured and unstructured knowledge processes . Here's a short overview of this topic and some questions: Knowledge Management is currently often related to the unstructured information and knowledge processes in organizations. In the past the focus of KM was on the structured side. But how can/are these combined in organizations? More specifically: how does enterprise 2.0 relate to BPM? (As you may know this is being heavily debated now on the web.) Questions: Intro: Is the summary clear? Is the distinction clear? What do you call unstructured information/knowledge processes and structured pro...

Just to let you know: I will be giving a talk at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt am Main in October. Please find the full schedule here. My talk will be about our microblogging experiences and my vision on how the information and communications processes supported by microblogging relate to more formal business processes . Hope to see you there!

When do you have enough information to make a next step or a decision? As you may know I love to process lots of information. Depending on the type of information I'll dive into it deeply or just dip my toe in it. After processing lots of information deciding when enough is enough has become easier for me. But it's hard for me to describe when I stop taking in information. Dave Snowden's Cynefin model has helped me in this sense. (By the way Snowden is currently summarizing the Cynefin model/approach/concept in several posts . The Cynefin model basically says: look at cause and effect. Is the cause and/or effect clear? Is the relationship between both clear? Depending on your answer different 'next steps' should be taken. For instance if the relationship between cause and effect is completely unclear. This is the complex domain. Probing is the thing to do. Don't go a read volumes of books and articles. Probe and see what happens, then act, etc. Even though ...

Is your organization a process (several operational steps to get things done) or a network (smart knowledge workers connecting to get things done)? Or is it both? As an information architect I'm often confronted with this question. Usually not explicitly, but in a more implicit way. From an information process perspective you hear people talking about structured and unstructured information processes, for instance. I've shared my thinking about this topic in the past and I'm working on a longer post about this subject (to be published soon). I thought I'd start with something different. Three pictures to show the different views on organizations and how they relate. I'd love to hear you thoughts about these pictures. What I see is managers and business process specialists look at organizations in this way: So, the organization is put together as discrete, operational steps moving packets of information (the gray boxes) forward. (Loops back into the organiz...

The company I work for, Océ , has a clear track record as a sustainable company. Way before it became the hot topic it is in these days. Every year we have a Sustainability Week to focus even more on this topic. During this week an interesting whitepaper was released. It is about 'All in Balance. Océ's eco-efficient and eco-effective approach to analog and digital document'. Reference is made to a paper I wrote with others about (personal) document processes. I hope you enjoy the whitepaper. If so leave a comment below or here .

Note: This post was written with my friend and colleague Rob Veltman ( @robveltman ). We carpool together and regularly talk about innovation and culture. Rob is an innovative product developer always challenging himself and his colleagues to ask the right questions to solve problems and make wishes come true. Rob is deeply interested in new product development, processes for (breakthrough) innovation and sustainability. Introduction How could we contribute to a more innovative organization? We ask ourselves this question regularly, help each other to come up with new ideas in this area and try to lead by example. We would like to share with you an aspect of our daily practice, which is the observation that our colleagues can experience hesitance in being innovative. We will propose a solution to overcome this hesitance. Situation Knowledge companies consist of very smart people, educated in different disciplines. Their knowledge workers are confronted with all kinds ...

Every now and then I run into something that really gets me thinking. Recently I ran into this presentation . ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here? View more presentations from Chris Messina . I went through it several times. And I think I'll do so in the coming days. Really great stuff!! Activity Streams: what are they, how can we collect and understand them? This presentation focuses on public streams, mostly on the internet. But does this story also extend to the streams behind the firewall, inside organization? I think it should, but I'm thinking about how this should work. Of course the firewalls are coming down. But companies will still be protecting their information to a certain extent. My thesis is: These streams will be most useful if the distinction between protected and public information is mixed. What do you think? And how do you think one stream of internal and external information can be devised? I'd love to hear your thoughts. (No...

Recently I organized an Océ -internal seminar about Information and Knowledge Management. I invited prof. dr. Robert de Hoog (of the University of Twente) to kick off this seminar with an introduction to information and knowledge management. He has a very interesting and pragmatic approach to these fields. De Hoog has written a lot about knowledge management, definitions and practice. This definition resulted from his pragmatic approach and could also help knowledge management department and knowledge managers do the right thing. I'm curious what you think of it. Here's the definition (my own translation from Dutch): Knowledge management is the management task consisting of a structured cycle of activities to identify, initiate and track interventions/actions, optimizing the use of knowledge in business processes, considering the positive and negative aspects of knowledge. An example of a positive aspect of knowledge is: it can grow. A negative aspect is: knowledge i...

For some time now I've been participating in a group of information and knowledge management practitioners ('DutchOpen KM'). These friends work in large, international companies, based in the Netherlands. The idea is simple: We get together about 2-3 times a year, define a topic per meeting and discuss that topic. Sometimes some participants will give a short presentation about the topic and how it's addressed in their company. Sometimes a couple of lines of text is enough to spark the discussion. I'm always happily surprised about the way these meetings go. The open way we talk, the respectful way disagreements are discussed, the great ideas that are shared, the contacts these meetings give afterwards, etc. Is this just a coincidence? We just happen to have a nice bunch of people grouped together? They definitely are nice. But I don't think it's a coincidence. It's what I also see in the blogging community - at least the part I interact with. It h...

Does your company share and manage process information centrally? And, if so, where is that information share/stored? I usually make a general distinction when thinking about enterprise information. I distinguish four types of information: process information: information describing the processes of the company, the way of working and best practices, the document templates, etc. product information: information about products, such as designs, requirements, parts descriptions, product structure(s), etc. project information: information used to manage a project, like minutes, task lists, progress reports, customer visit reports, etc. departmental information: information about resources, monthly reports about the department, presentations given to the department, etc. In many companies process information is shared and stored all over the place. Part of the information can be found on the intranet. I think most process info is shared here. Some process information...

Some time ago a friend asked me to give him a list of my favorite books about information and knowledge management. I emailed them to him, but I'd also like to share my list with you. I'd like to hear how this list relates to your favorite IM and KM books. If you would recommend other books, please leave a comment with the title! Here's my list (in no specific order): Chun Wei Choo, Information Management for the Intelligent Organization . Basic book on information management. Thomas Davenport, Thinking for a living . About the characteristics of knowledge work. Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive . Must read because the term 'knowledge worker' is used in this book for the first time. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information . Great book stressing that information is social. This is mainstream now, but at the time this book was published it wasn't... Mathieu Weggeman, Kennismanagement . [Dutch] The Dutch book...

Last weekend I read an intriguing article in the Dutch newspaper, NRC . A communication researcher, Tjardus van Citters , wanted to give us all well-meaning advice. (Dutch titel: 'Welgemeend advies van een communicatie-expert: minder communicatie, s.v.p', Sept. 20, 2009.) His article gives an overview of the sources that are increasing the number of signals we process each day. For instance the number of communication providers has increased. And the fact that our senses are being addressed more than ever. This overview leads to his advice to communicate less. Why? Because our health is at stake. Our brains get more impulses to process. The model of 'selective perception' is out-dated. We get irritated by communication we did not want to see, leading to restlessness, even illness. He therefore advises us to turn off signals. Read the news once a week instead of every few hours. Unsubscribe to things you don't want to receive. Be clear what kind of emails you ...

A colleague of mine kindly pointed me to an interesting report: "The Rise of the Digital C-Suite. How executives locate and filter business information'. It's a Forbes Insight report, sponsored by Google. To be clear, this report is about how executives look for and process external information. Information that is on the web. It would be very interesting to read a comparable report on how execs do the same for internal information. I think it's the case for many execs they're too busy to follow and look for external trends anyway. Surprisingly more than 60% of the execs said they accessed the Internet for business intelligence on a daily basis. Another interesting part of the report is how execs use web 2.0. For the 50+ category 80% or more didn't maintain a blog or tweet. Only 26% of the 'under 40' category didn't tweet. RSS is not used much at all over all categories. Only 40% of the 'under 40' category for instance. Which regrett...

How do you pick up weak signals and make sense of them? In some cases we'd rather not pick them up at all. This goes for us personally ('what is being said about you?') and for companies ('who's talking about us and why?') MIT Sloan Review ran a very interesting article on this topic: "How to make Sense of Weak Signals" by Paul Schoemaker and George Day (Spring 2009). What is a weak signal anyway? Shoemaker and Day define it as: A seemingly random or disconnected piece of information that at first appears to be background noise but can be recognized as part of a significant pattern by viewing it through a different frame or connecting it with other pieces or information. I was surprised to read that "fewer than 20% of global companies have sufficient capacity to spot, interpret and act on the weak signals of forthcoming threats and opportunities." It would be nice to read some best-practices in this area. A general framework to ma...

Andrew McAfee has another really nice post: 'When Information is NOT the Answer' . I advise you to go and read it, definitely if you are in IT. And for Knowledge and Information Management experts this post summarizes what you've been trying to tell IT all along. McAfee basically shows that not all information can be processed using IT systems. Even though many think so and heavily depend on these systems for decision making. And he gives an example of a company, Zara, that acknowledges this and works with it in practice. In a comment on his post I pointed to two books that underline the point McAfee's making. One is 'Blink' by Gladwell. (And I'll write a review of this book soon.) And the other is 'The Social Life of Information' by Seely Brown & Duguid. (The last book is one of my all time favorites.) If you haven't read them, please do so. It's very worth your time. In 'The social life' they have that nice example of a c...

Mark Morrell of BT has an interesting post on the different types of intranet content they distinguish . I commented on this post , but would like to extend my comment here. Mark distinguishes between personal, crowd, team and formal content. I commented: Interesting post! What I was wondering is: is this list right? For you I understand it is. But can’t ‘team’ content be ‘formal’ for instance? And isn’t ‘personal’ a security issue? For instance, I’m working on some content I don’t want to share yet (so it’s personal), but in time it will be in the category ‘crowd’? I’ll blog about this and tell you what my categories are. Thanks for sparking this discussion. I'm curious if you agree with my remarks. Do you make different distinctions? Anyway, I think it's great BT is distinguishing between content. I find that lots of content that is now on intranets shouldn't be their anyway. And I see that BT is not only making this distinction but also providing different ap...

I prefer to read longer articles (even blog posts...) on paper. For instance I read Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan articles. Our corporate library allows me to read those articles in hard-copy. Of course the librarians have access to the digital sources of these magazines, but I don't. What I usually do is browse through the magazine and make copies of the articles I want to read (or I think are interesting for my colleagues). In this way I can read them when and where I want. When I read articles I usually write comments in the sidelines and highlight what I find interesting and important to remember. These marks are very important to me. So important that I would archive the hard-copy of the article in binders. At least until recently. If I could get my hands on a digital copy I would file that one on my computer with the comments. Over time I've collected many articles and found that I hardly reuse those articles in my work. Filing them is hard and therefore ...

Thomas Baekdal has a very interesting post titled "Where is everybody?" His post comes along with a really nice visualization to prove his point (refer to his blog post and the picture I added into this post). It would be interesting to extend this post and visualization with other kinds of information. For instance, office documents, flyers, etc. Baekdal also leaves out books. Books would come in between 'local marketplace' and 'newspapers', I think. And office documents (like Word docs) came around 1990-1995? I remember typing my first report in WordPerfect around 1993. At that time you were still allowed to write your report in handwriting. Wow, time flies! --- If You Read This and Like It, Tweet This to your Followers: Where's Information Headed? http://twurl.nl/56qrqe Tags van Technorati: information , information management , information architecture